The Power of the Middle Ground: A Couple's Guide to Renewing Your Relationship

By Marty Babits, LCSW, BCD

The Back Story

My original goal in writing The Power of the Middle Ground: A Couple’s Guide to Renewing Your Relationshipwas to provide couples that came to see me for counseling with a readable guide that they could consult in-between sessions to help them integrate what they were learning in couples therapy. Research shows that many couples wait too long before reaching out for help. This makes it hard for them to think clearly or feel optimistic about making the needed improvements.

This book is designed to provide a safe space - an anti-stress buffer - that partners can use to help themselves become acclimated to the Middle Ground concepts - and the hopefulness that develops as a result - at their own pace.

The book - though originally intended as a support for couples in counseling - is also intended for use as a self-help manual.

MIDDLE GROUND IS NOT COMPROMISE

The Middle Ground is not an area in which you give up on what you want and settle for the best you can get. Instead, it is an area in which you and your partner can learn to express yourselves, explore your thoughts and feelings and figure out how to include and honor as much of each other's hopes and dreams as is possible.The Middle Ground perspective helps couples to reconnect with, and honor, the richness and of their relationship's potential.

Welcome to the Power of the Middle Ground

What is the “Middle Ground”?Imagine a place:• that brings the potential for love and compassion alive within your relationship • where you and your partner learn to communicate more productively. • where understandings can develop from genuine differences? • where natural capacities for sharing can be unfrozen and an atmosphere of emotional safety can flourish.What would you call such a place? I call it the “Middle Ground.” If you are looking for help in your relationship you are very likely unable to see this place clearly. Perhaps you’ve seen it but didn’t recognize what you were witnessing. Perhaps you have never—not even within your imagination—had a glimpse of it. This is the Middle Ground.

This book will help you identify the middle ground potential in your relationship and guide you in developing it. You can begin by taking theFREE Middle Ground Quiz which will help you evaluate the condition of your own Middle Ground.

Hear the Buzz:

“The Power of the Middle Ground is an easy to read self–help book with many clinical vignettes and couple-strengthening exercises. Too often self-help books are terrific at describing a problem, only to give scant suggestions for improving the situations. Mr. Babits has accomplished the art of describing what needs to be achieved and how to achieve it at the same time . . . “- Paula F. Eagle, M.D. ; Associate Clinical Professor of Psychiatry, Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons; Faculty, Columbia Psychoanalytic Center for Training and Research; Private Practice, New York City.

“ . . .The Middle Ground is where the heart of a relationship’s aliveness, its resilience, is located. . . . The middle-ground is a potential that exists within love’s province, in which the hard-edged realities of keeping a contemporary relationship vital, can be found.”- From the Preface, by Ron Taffel, Ph.D.; Executive Director of the Institute for Contemporary Psychotherapy, NYC; Author of “Parenting by Heart,” “Breaking Through to Teens,” . . .

"Writing this wonderful book, Marty Babits drew on thousands of hours of experience as a professional couple and family therapist - and it shows. Always a voice for compassion . . . His book is a joyful tribute to possibility." - Elizabeth Ann Danto, Ph.D.; Author of, “Freud’s Free Clinics: Psychoanalysis and Social Justice”; Associate Professor of Social Work, Hunter College, City University of New York.

“Mr Babits presents a thought-provoking self-help odyssey for couples, gay and straight, who want to be engaged in building and enriching their relationships. Easy to read, with questionnaires, exercises, and illustrative vignettes, "The Power of the Middle Ground" offers couples a unique chance to hear and understand one another.”- Hillary Mayers, LCSW; Co-Director, Institiute for Child, Adolescent and Family Studies; Director, Chances for Children Program, NYC.